Can You Deep Fry Precooked Shrimp?

Discover how you can take frozen cooked shrimp and make delicious homemade fried shrimp with it in a cast iron Dutch oven. Coat the shrimp in a panko breadcrumb batter for the best crunch.

📋 What's New In This Post (4/10/25) - Added information about thermometers you can use to monitor the temperature of your frying oil.

✍🏻 Featured Comment - Kirsten says "First time frying any food, and this recipe was easy to follow! Now I have my confidence to fry food!!! Definitely recommend & will be making this recipe again!"

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Jump to:

• I Have Always Used Pre-Cooked
• Pros of Cooked Shrimp
• Ingredients
• Tips for Breading Shrimp
• Tips for Frying the Shrimp
• FAQ
• How to Fry Cooked Shrimp with Panko

• You don't have to peel or devein anything. I am not the most skilled person with my hands, so this doesn't appeal to me at all. Catch my pun?
• You don't have to be worried that the shrimp is not fully coked inside. There is no chance you're going to burn the outside before the inside is cooked. That takes the stress out of frying.

Pros of Cooked Shrimp

While most recipes are going to tell you to buy raw shrimp, I think there are two big pros to choosing precooked shrimp instead.

Ingredients

Let me give you the rundown of all the ingredients you are going to need.

• Cooked Shrimp - the 50-55 count bag (sometimes considered "medium"). The number on a bag of shrimp indicates how many shrimp you get per pound. The larger the shrimp the less you get per pound. The 50-55 count bag gives you the perfect size shrimp for deep frying
• All-purpose flour - The flour is used as the first layer.
• Eggs - Beaten eggs are added to the floured shrimp in order to help the breadcrumbs stick.

• Panko bread crumbs - Rather than relying on ordinary, traditional bread crumbs for fried shrimp, I prefer to use Panko, the Japanese-style bread crumb. Panko imparts a superior level of crispiness that conventional bread crumbs simply cannot match. I did side by side taste test once and all of my kids prefer the panko breaded shrimp. I have a blog post that goes over the Differences Between Panko and Regular Breadcrumbs.
• Kosher salt - I typically use kosher salt in my recipes but you can use whatever you have.
• Canola, vegetable, or peanut oil - Use which oil you want for deep frying. I wouldn't use the good, expensive extra virgin olive oil.

Tips for Breading Shrimp

For breading shrimp I employ a three step process

1. Coat the shrimp in all-purpose flour
2. Dust off excess flour, coat with beaten eggs
3. Let egg drip off, and then drop into Panko breadcrumbs

Bonus Tip - You can use your hands to bread the shrimp, just make sure you use a different hand when dipping the shrimp into the egg or you will end up with a bunch of flour and breadcrumbs stuck to your hand. This is what Alton Brown refers to as "club hand"!

Tips for Frying the Shrimp

The best way to fry shrimp is to use a cast iron Dutch oven. Cast iron is great at staying hot, so it's a great choice for frying where you need to try to maintain the right temperature.

Here is a 30-second video you can watch on how I deep fry my shrimp.

I like using an infrared thermometer to get a quick readout of what the oil temperature is. Now the downside is that it's only getting the surface temperature, so it's not perfect but keeps your hands care away from that hot oil.

Since I created this video, I have changed to using The Smoke X from ThermoWorks. I have a clip that I put on the side of my Dutch oven and the readout will tell me what the exact temperature is. I love this model because it has a high and low temperature setting, so it can alert me if my oil is too low and if my oil is too high.

FAQ